This disclosure includes a microfiche appendix having 1185 frames and 25 microfiche.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general to methods for database publishing, and in particular to a method for creating a direct link from one or more data server, such as an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) and Structured Query Language (SQL) compliant data source, into a desktop publishing application.
2. Description of the Background Art
Traditionally, databases have been used to manage vast amounts of data where quick access and flexible selection and sorting are crucial. Since a database's primary mission is to store rapidly changing data, report generation tools have often stressed speed of report development over the presentation of information. As a result, it is often difficult or impossible to prepare a polished report when the underlying data will be changed when the report is finished.
Publishing systems, on the other hand, typically focus on more stable information such as user documentation, manuals and instructions. As a result, most publishing systems offer tools to more effectively communicate fixed information rather than tools that dynamically accommodate changing data.
Technology has moved to the point where compromising between a database's need for speed, and a publishing system's emphasis on quality of output, is no longer acceptable. Thus, the technique known as database publishing is created through the marriage of database and publishing system. Database publishing bridges the gap between speed of report generation and documentation quality.
Database publishing, therefore, is defined here as a data-driven method of generating formatted documents for printed media and electronic formatted documents (i.e., PDF and HTML file formats). The usual method of creating such documents is manually through a desktop publishing application. However, if the contents of the document are presented in repeating structural patterns, then creating and using a method to create the document that is automatic and controlled by the data being published would be far more efficient than creating that same document manually. Examples of documents that fall in this category are catalogs (i.e., product and course), directories (i.e., informational, phone, and membership), manuals (i.e., instructional, procedural, test and maintenance), reference books, and reports (i.e., financial and statistical).
Traditionally, two processes have been implemented with software to perform database publishing. They are report generators and tagged intermediate output applications.
Report generators are the paradigm most often used for creating formatted output from a database. Their use can be seen as a template or pattern that gets repeated over and over again, depending on how many rows are in the result set of a given query. Each data item has a specific place in the pattern. The space allocated to each data item may expand or contract as the size of the data values changes from row to row, but the positions of the data fields never changes. Report generators typically create final printed pages and have limited formatting capability. There is also no intermediate output that can be modified before the pages are printed.
Tagged intermediate output has been commonly used to extract data from a database into a formatted document. A tagged intermediate output file is typically an American National Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) file that uses a markup language that is proprietary to the target formatting engine. This type of process typically uses an application to extract information from a database and create a flat file or series of flat files that contain the database information and an application specific tag set. Another application may be used to allow a standard desktop application (i.e., Quark's Xpress, Adobe's PageMaker or FrameMaker, etc.) to import the flat file or files.
There are a number of variations on this tagged intermediate output method. These are: Database-specific applications, which generally are limited in that only one database type can be used as a data source; desktop-application-specific tagging, in which a tagging method specific to a desktop publishing application is used in a database output file; and desktop application independent tagging, which uses an output file tagging method that is generic in that another application is used to convert information for use with each specific desktop publishing application.